Theatre is a mirror, but for what? We quote "Hamlet," saying that performance should hold a "mirror up to nature"; in an interview, the playwright Dominique Morisseau cited Nina Simone, who said that an artist's duty is "to reflect the times." Nature, right; the times, of course-the theatre should reflect those things. But a play might also be positioned to show us the person who wrote it.
In "Sunset Baby," now at the Off Broadway Pershing Square Signature Center, Morisseau, best known for her play cycle, "The Detroit Project," invites us to look at the fraught final encounters between a woman and her activist father. When Nina (Moses Ingram) was five years old, her dad, the Black Power revolutionary Kenyatta (Russell Hornsby), went to prison for an attempted armored-truck heist-to "steal capitalist dollars in the name of Third World democracy," Nina sneers-and her once renegade mother dwindled into heartbreak and, eventually, addiction and early death. Now Nina is grown and making her own violent way, along with her boyfriend, Damon (J. Alphonse Nicholson). Together they think of themselves as Bonnie and Clyde, gun-toting tricksters who lure men into drug deals and rob them. Nina and Damon don't want radical liberation; they want ten thousand dollars. That stash will finally let them escape East New York for Paris or London or some other beautiful place that Nina has fallen in love with via the Travel Channel.
Bu hikaye The New Yorker dergisinin March 04, 2024 sayısından alınmıştır.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Giriş Yap
Bu hikaye The New Yorker dergisinin March 04, 2024 sayısından alınmıştır.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Giriş Yap
YULE RULES
“Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point.”
COLLISION COURSE
In Devika Rege’ first novel, India enters a troubling new era.
NEW CHAPTER
Is the twentieth-century novel a genre unto itself?
STUCK ON YOU
Pain and pleasure at a tattoo convention.
HEAVY SNOW HAN KANG
Kyungha-ya. That was the entirety of Inseon’s message: my name.
REPRISE
Reckoning with Donald Trump's return to power.
WHAT'S YOUR PARENTING-FAILURE STYLE?
Whether you’re horrifying your teen with nauseating sex-ed analogies or watching TikToks while your toddler eats a bagel from the subway floor, face it: you’re flailing in the vast chasm of your child’s relentless needs.
COLOR INSTINCT
Jadé Fadojutimi, a British painter, sees the world through a prism.
THE FAMILY PLAN
The pro-life movement’ new playbook.
President for Sale - A survey of today's political ads.
On a mid-October Sunday not long ago sun high, wind cool-I was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a book festival, and I took a stroll. There were few people on the streets-like the population of a lot of capital cities, Harrisburg's swells on weekdays with lawyers and lobbyists and legislative staffers, and dwindles on the weekends. But, on the façades of small businesses and in the doorways of private homes, I could see evidence of political activity. Across from the sparkling Susquehanna River, there was a row of Democratic lawn signs: Malcolm Kenyatta for auditor general, Bob Casey for U.S. Senate, and, most important, in white letters atop a periwinkle not unlike that of the sky, Kamala Harris for President.
